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5 Ideas to Convert More Online Holiday Sales

Are you ready for the biggest selling season of the year? From marketing to email to site design, there are lots of steps you should take to prepare yourself for the coming weeks of holiday shopping.

This season can be the most wonderful time of year for online retailers. To learn five big tips to increase holiday conversions, watch this quick video.Hi there! Matt here, your resident ecommerce guru at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. When it comes to ecommerce, every transaction counts. But to be honest, there’s something very special about the holiday season – maybe it’s the number of people looking to buy online or the potential to make big bucks to round out the year for your business. Either way, converting holiday sales is important so play close attention, because today I’m going to teach you 5 tips to do just that. The first tip on Santa’s list is to increase average order value, that is, the dollar amount that your customers spend on each purchase. This can be done by upselling and cross-selling users on your website. For example, you could offer free shipping with a $50 purchase or even offer a $5 gift card with a $50 purchase. Or, try recommending related or recommended products by bundling accessories or offering product suggestions. Second, and this one’s easy, don’t require registration at checkout. Shoppers are more hurried during the holidays, so don’t force them to enter a ton of information before purchasing. While it may be tempting to collect that info for database purposes, closing the sale is more important this time of year. Third on our list is creating a sense of urgency. Remember, packages need to be delivered and wrapped before the big winter holidays, so light a fire under your customers by listing a countdown to Christmas on your website or offering one-time offers or flash deals. The idea here is to make customers react immediately instead of considering the pros and cons of making a purchase. Fourth, think about how you package your coupons and discounts. In other words, leverage the psychology of discounts to make your coupons more attractive. For example, does buy-one-get-one-free seem more attractive than 50% off? Does a dollar amount seem better than a percentage off? The trick here is to look at the price of your product and how deep the discount, then come up with various ways to present them. Last but not least, be sure to offer real-time customer support. One of the best ways to do this is through an interactive live chat tool, but having real-time phone support is important as well. The idea here is to be able to immediately answer any customer questions before they leave your site and move to a competitor’s. Use these 5 tips as your starting point to hearing sleigh bells all the way to the bank. We wish you the very best of luck this upcoming holiday season! Have any questions? Feel free to drop me a line in the comments box below. From me to you, Happy Selling!

But getting customers to your site isn’t enough: instead, you need to make sure that shoppers will actually make a purchase once they get there. After all, what’s the point of spending all that time and effort in prepping if you don’t make any money out of it? To help you convert more sales this holiday season, check out this video for some simple tips that will have you hearing sleigh bells ringing all the way to the bank.